Brown overturned segregation only in education, not other domains

Evidence

It would take almost six decades for another Supreme Court to pick up where Justice Harlan’s dissent left off. In the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, who was also director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), argued that Plessy v. Ferguson’s doctrine of “separate but equal” was inherently prejudicial under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the LDF brief, Marshall not only cited Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy but was inspired by it. Marshall had reportedly read passages from Harlan’s dissent to his staff as they brainstormed ways to legally attack segregation. And for once, a majority of the Supreme Court agreed. As a result, all legislation mandating racial segregation in education was finally overturned. But only in education. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 403

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘only in education’ limitation is Brown’s crucial narrowing—bears directly on reparations as remedy: it shows the law addressing one domain of harm while leaving the system otherwise intact. — connects to: Only congressional intervention, not Brown alone, desegregated Southern schools